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The First World War - uthe great seminal catastrophe" of the twentieth century1 - claims a prominent position in British cultural memory. As Paul Fussell points out in his study The Great War and Modern Memory, the idea of this war, which the British have remembered and mythologised as the "Great War", "derives primarily from the images of the trenches in France and Belgium".4 These trenches have become a symbol not only of the murderous atrocities of the first modern war, but also of the countless soldiers who were severely traumatised by their experiences on the Western front. Servicemen on all sides broke down on a large scale once they were faced with the horrors of industrialised warfare. Tens of thousands of British officers and members of other ranks were diagnosed with diverse combat neuroses, which were subsumed under the term "shell shock".5
It is this scene of traumatised soldiers of the First World War that provides both context and thematic focus for Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, which investigates the impact of the First World War on British society and culture. As I will argue in this chapter, Barker approaches the aspect of trauma from three different socio-cultural perspectives. In Regeneration (1991) and The Ghost Road (1995), trauma is set in relation to aspects of gender, while The Eye in the Door (1993) explores the psychological dimension of trauma and provides ethical comments on the traumatised subject and society.6
Trauma and gender
In the Author's Note to Regeneration, Barker acknowledges Elaine Showalter' s The Female Malady as one of the sources she used for writing her novel. In her study, Showalter elaborates on the phenomenon once described as shell shock, arguing that "it was related to social expectations of the masculine role in the war".8 Wartime notions of masculinity celebrated emotional repression and self-control as the epitome of manly behaviour. As Showalter explains:
Chief among the values promoted within the male community of the war was the ability to tolerate the appalling filth and stink of the trenches, the relentless noise, and the constant threat of death with stoic good humor, and to allude to it in phlegmatic understatement. Indeed, emotional repression was an essential aspect of the British masculine ideal.
However, many British soldiers...